Scholasticism for Instagram

Applying the general view of theories of systems and social action, the article shows how the images and patterns of the digital world revolve around the idea of an individualized subject. Embodying the idea of a unique “self ” - the basis of our cultural model of personality - paradoxically requires replicating, selecting and reproducing the atomistic images of the virtual world. This is a cultural model as well as a psychological one: it is manifested in institutionalized practices, has symbolic structure, imagery, ideology and is entrenched in praxis. However, the logic of operating with the alienated and integrated, replicated and authentic, external and internal - when the source of internal vital forces is assigned from the outside - directs us to anthropology, which reveals a similar pattern in a wide range of ethnographic material. The author therefore favors anthropological models over a more conventional structuralist analysis. The article shows how the basic cultural model of the Western concept of the self is manifested in the modern practice of replicating the virtual. Therefore a contradictio in contrarium is exposed through an illustrative sociological description of the way an impersonal system of social action produces its own environment and structures behavior inside and outside of the online communication as a positive feedback mechanism. However, if an authentic subject is composed entirely of replicated elements, then what position does the subject occupy in it? No answer to the question is available from inside the schema. The author’s solution is that the implementation of the schema itself through a system of actions embodies the basic concepts for locating the source of individual uniqueness outside of the subject itself. Hence, copying and replicating is the logical embodiment of our model of the self, and not at all a dissolution into the virtual and replacement of the authentic version by a digital one

Cultural anthropology · Late modernity · Praxis · Schema (genetic algorithms · Sociopolitical Dynamics in Russia

• Art And Agency

  Alfred Gell•Art and agency•1998

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• Behavior, Purpose and Teleology

  Open Access•Arturo Rosenblueth, Norbert Wiener et al.•Philosophy of Science•1943

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